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Although I don’t think it’s a secret amongst SEOs, a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog explains that Google does not look at the keywords meta tag. The reason is somewhat obvious: it’s such an easy tag to abuse that it has no value.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that the keywords meta tag is dead. From the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, plenty of sites still use the useless tag. There’s plenty of reinforcement that it has value (example: the popular WordPress plugin All-in-One SEO Pack auto-generates the tag for bloggers). And I still occasionally run into people who believe that copying their competitor’s keywords is somehow an effective SEO technique.

While one could argue that it doesn’t hurt to include the keywords meta tag on pages, the widespread use of a tag that has essentially been depreciated shows that old habits die hard in the world of SEO.

And so do myths. Which brings us to the description meta tag, something that Google does utilize:

…we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets…

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

The important point: the description meta tag isn’t a ranking factor. But once you’re ranking, the descriptions you provide can be valuable in helping convince users to click when Google uses them as snippets. Therefore, each description meta tag should contain a simple, concise and compelling summary of your page’s content. The goal: enable a real human being to determine if your page is relevant to his or her query.

What the description meta tag is not: another place to stuff keywords. Using 20 keywords that you’d like a page to rank for in your description is not an appropriate technique and most importantly, if your keyword-stuffed description somehow manages to get used as a snippet in the first place, there’s a good chance users won’t click on your result, defeating the purpose of your SEO efforts in the first place.

Of course, none of the information Google has provided will come as a surprise to SEOs and experienced online publishers. When it comes down to it, content is king and quality is his queen. No meta tag can change that; if it was that easy, everybody would have top SERPs.

Last week I published an article called ‘The 27 varieties of tweet used by retailers’ to show the breadth of topics covered on Twitter by retail firms. It also allowed me to answer the ‘but what will we tweet about?’ question sometimes posed by Twitter newcomers.

To be clear, my position on social media is that it is helpful to businesses of all shapes and sizes, and that it can improve lots of key business metrics (sales, but more importantly profits, retention, customer satisfaction, etc).

Read that back: it can help all businesses, of all shapes and sizes. The trouble is that is going to be harder for the larger companies to implement social media, compared to smaller, more agile businesses. And is this effort likely to pay off? It’s rather hard to say for sure… there’s definitely a gamble involved here, and a real need to avoid the hype and bandwagon jumping that surrounds the social media space.

Peter Cutler left a comment on my ’27 tweets’ post that raises this precise issue: “This is good. But where’s the ROI? And time is money. So where’s the Return On Investment?”

There are more opportunities than ever for developers today but that doesn’t mean that making money is always easy. Some of the most attractive platforms for developers are far from perfect and fraught with risk.

Some Facebook app developers were reminded of that this weekend when their applications were shut down without warning due to ads served up by the third party Facebook ad networks many of them rely on to generate revenue.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.